Meet Microsoft Cortana

Voice Recognition Meets Artificial Intelligence

Ever so often in the tech world, new products get released with catchy names, some of which can make you feel stupid because of ignorance, if mentioned by peers in those techy conversations that we love so much! One such catchy word is Cortana. So what’s Microsoft Cortana?

If you remember very well during the glory days of Nokia phones, almost a decade ago, one cool feature I still remember vividly today was an awesome voice recognition feature available on some of the high-end Nokia models that could help you make calls by simply speaking a phrase to the phone like “Call Jane”. Now, Cortana is voice-recognition driven intelligent personal assistant that can do exactly just that (what the Nokia phones used to do) and more!

First introduced to Windows Phone 8.1, Cortana can help you do useful things on your phone like:

Calling people (saved in your phone book)

Sending text messages

Adding reminders to your calender

Playing music on your phone

Telling you what the weather is.

Give you news feeds based on your interests e.g sports game results or traffic alerts.

Setting the alarm for you.

In short, Cortana is a very useful personal assistant that can save you lots of time that you would have otherwise have used to manually type or swipe on your phone to do these simple every day tasks. So the next question is, what can you say to Cortana to get her to do some of these tasks listed above? Below is a table detailing key phrases that you can speak to Cortana on your Windows Phone, to get her to do some tasks for you: